Wordsworth’s Epic Imagination

As a poet William Wordsworth seemed unsure whether he stood on Milton’s shoulders or in Milton’s shadow. His vigorous sonnet “London 1802” addresses Milton as both a revolutionary and as a heroic poet: “Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour.” For Wordsworth his great predecessor was a blazing reformer in a corrupt world, a solitary figure who stood apart and yet could rally the public conscience and the public will to take decisive action—an eloquent and muscular champion of liberty, a force of Nature whose words discharged irresistible power: “Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea; / Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free.” Many of the most distinctive features of Milton’s poetic voice insinuated themselves into Wordsworth’s writing. When in The Prelude he characterizes the callowness of his youth as “Unchastened, unsubdued, unawed, unraised / To patriarchal dignity of mind,” it is evident that he lives and breathes the Miltonic penchant for triplings and quadruplings and for grand sequences of negating adjectives. Elsewhere in The Prelude Wordsworth recalls how, as an undergraduate at Cambridge, he visited the rooms in which Milton had lived when he was a student and there celebrated the memory of “that great bard” by getting drunk for the first time in his life. In his prospectus to The Excursion, the poetically flat-footed nine-book opus that Wordsworth intended as one component of a three-part epic to be titled The Recluse, he explicitly channels Paradise Lost by adopting a phrase from Milton’s invocation to book vii: “fit audience let me find though few!” In that same poem the character of the Wanderer—a displacement of Wordsworth himself—reminisces about his youthful purchase from a country bookstall of “the Book that most had tempted his desires” written by “that mighty Orb of Song / the divine Milton.”

That Wordsworth along with other writers of his era revered Milton is not news. Seventy-five years ago Herbert Grierson in Milton and Wordsworth set about collecting the debts to and quotations from Milton in Wordsworth’s poetry and established the extent of the Miltonic legacy. And more than forty years ago Joseph Wittreich produced The Romantics on Milton, an exhaustive compendium of allusions and homages, echoes and reconstitutions of Milton in the prose and poetic writings of the Romantics that document the resurgence of Milton’s poetic afterlife in the nineteenth century. But what I have been thinking about is what the Milton-Wordsworth link can tell us about the later poet’s struggle to establish his own literary identity and, in his own way, to emulate Milton’s ambition “to soar Above th’ Aonian mount” of the ancient epic poets. Plainly Wordsworth wanted to be the Milton of his century. More than anything he yearned to write “a narrative Poem of the Epic kind,” as he phrased it in an 1805 letter to George Beaumont. But the prime candidate to fill that niche in Wordsworth’s oeuvre, the long autobiographical narrative eventually titled after his death The Prelude, he viewed only as a warm-up to the real thing: the long-considered but never-completed philosophical poem, The Recluse. In that same letter to Beaumont, Wordsworth confesses to being in a funk occasioned by his completion in 1805 of a thirteen-book version of his untitled poem about his own life. “I was dejected on many accounts; when I looked back upon the performance it seemed to have a dead weight about it, the reality so far short of the expectation; it was the first long labour that I had finished, and the doubt whether I should ever live to write the Recluse, and the sense which I had of this Poem being so far below what I seemed capable of executing, depressed me much.”

Actually Wordsworth would live another forty-five years, and throughout thirty-four of them he kept coming back to that first long labor, revising it, adding to it, subtracting from it, obsessing over it, but never publishing it. In his recent Wordsworth’s Revisitings Stephen Gill, surveying the poet’s habits of composition...